As We May Think
Source
The essay appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945 (vol. 176, no. 1, pp. 101–108), and Life magazine published an abridged version that September. Vannevar Bush worries that science is serving destruction rather than understanding, and describes a machine that would make accumulated knowledge available to people.
That machine is the memex, a piece of furniture that stores documents on microfilm and lets its user link them into associative trails. Doug Engelbart was among the essay’s readers, and it strongly influenced his later work.
In my articles
The second part of my second brain series opens with this essay, because as early as 1945 it described a machine that supports memory.
Sources
Related articles
Related entries
Last checked:
All entriesVannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) was an American engineer and inventor who wrote the 1945 essay “As We May Think”, which describes a device called the memex.
Memex
The memex is a memory aid that Vannevar Bush described in 1945. It was never built, but the “associative trails” it would have used to connect documents resemble the hyperlinks we use today.
Doug Engelbart
Doug Engelbart (1925–2013) was an American researcher who publicly demonstrated the computer mouse and hypertext in 1968. His work on these ideas was inspired by an essay by Vannevar Bush.